Monday, April 09, 2012

Watch "Conservative" Assholes Rip Into Mike Wallace

Here are three things that are more or less constant in terms of how I view the world:

1.) There are essentially two kinds of people: THINKERS and BELIEVERS.

2.) The previous statement refers to the manner in which one looks at the world, NOT necessarily to whether or not one is a "person of faith" - though, obviously, there are some incidenta correlations.

3.) While the situation may have been different in the past, Believers haven't been doing much in the way of long-term good for the world in a long, long time; and today they function almost exclusively as a series of annoying roadblocks holding the rest of the world back from a better future.

Anyway...

When right-wing muckraker Andrew Breitbart passed away suddenly earlier this year, the mainstream news outlets that he'd made a career of slandering with bogus "bias" charges bent over backwards to be generous and recall the good points of the guy; partly out of deference to his grieving family, but also perhaps in the knowledge that his legion of ill-informed followers - Believers who'd absorbed the ridiculous mythology of the Liberal Media Boogeyman whole - were poised to descend upon them en masse if they did otherwise.

Try to keep that extension to goodwill in mind, as you read the comments from Breitbart's acolytes posted on this Breitbart blog post announcing the death of actual journalist Mike Wallace.
Some choice samples from the comment thread:

"A charming socialist is still a socialist."

"Obama has one less vote now."

"A shining member of the mentally retarded left-wing liberal mainstream media, the people who conspired and lied, AND CONTINUE TO CONSPIRE AND LIE, in order to advance an equally retarded left-wing liberal agenda, an agenda that CREATED America's Second Great Depression.Good riddance to bad rubbish."

"WHAT EVER! Sorry for Chris, lost his Dad but all this nonsense about this liberal knucklehead being legendary is so much baloney."

"Wallace personally caused SeeBS to be involved in several costly lawsuits by his skewing of the facts(remember Gen William Westmoreland) . Wallace was a commie ideologue, plain and simple. Every a$$clown on "60 minutes" was, whether it was Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, and worse of all, Andy Rooney."

"Wallace was a sham. He refused to go after hard left figures(he once refused an assignment to interview Bill Ayers in 1974), yet some of his harder-hitting "stories" turned out to be somewhat less. Like most media, he was a commie ideolgoue first, and it showed in his reporting."

Adorable.

For all the nonsense about "voter fraud" currently slithering through the media - both as a desperation-gambit to suppress Democrat-leaning voters during the election and fuel the accusations of Obama's illegitimacy after - it bothers me a hell of a lot more that some of these people are actual voters. Churchill may have been correct when he called Democracy may be "the worst form of government except all the others;" but forgive me if I seem increasingly less romantic about a system that holds the governing input of the ignorant and the paranoid "equal" to that of the intelligent and the rational.

I'm guessing you saw this and many other things and it has colored your thoughts on voter fraud.

My comments as QUITNIX:"Again, Ms. Maddow failed to do her do diligence as a reporter or even as a commentator.

This is not old news. After years of investigating a conviction happened NOW. These are not isolated voters, they where running a ring. Convictions are hard to get, because voter fraud is by definition identity fraud. Go not by convictions, and instead by dead people and animals voting after going through the rolls, and you will find that most of them vote for a certain party."

I wish voter ID states would actually PAY poor people to get IDs to stop these disenfranchisement/poll tax lies.

This is less of a comparison between Republican and Democrat or Thinkers and Believers as much as it is News Media Outlets vs Internet Comments sections. Congratulations, you told everyone that the average internet surfer is less mature then the average tv news outlet. If Fox News was slinging mud on the guy postmortem, that'd be one thing, but this is pretty par for the course as far as the internet goes.

By the way, Bob, you are not "Intelligent and rational". You're just arrogant and egotistical.

Seriously, what these people posted regarding Wallace's death was deplorable, but how is this any different from what you do? You belittle anyone who doesn't fully agree with your ideology in some effort to make yourself out to be a "superior" person. Get off your high horse, Chipman. You are a left-wing Limbaugh.

@JamesBob is not trying to make an "all x is y, object a is x therefore object a is y" argument.

My party has a problem with race/ethnicity, and you only need to look at the barely existant participation of non-whites in the republican party to see that. That does not mean that Republican proposals a designed to hurt minorities or the poor like liberals keep suggesting (ignore Romney's poor choice of words and look at his contributions to charity, compare to Obama, then tell me who really "does not care about the poor") but the problem with voters of both groups are there and plainly visible.

Likewise, at the religious end (also where I am at), we conservatives have both the benefit and weakness of passion, as the zealotry on the comments of that formal liberal's blog (yes, Breitbart was a democrat at one point believe it or not). However, there are times when going full-metal-rectum is fully justified.

What those commenters are doing, dissing the likes of Chris Wallace's dad no less, definitely is not one of those cases, and Mr. Chipman is right to point that out.

Yeah, I have to agree with some of the other posters here that this doesn't compare to how the media handled Breitbart's death as these people aren't professional journalists: they're commenters on a blog. Of course you're going to find nasty comments, same as one could when viewing blog-posts in various places about Breitbart's death.

And I don't think this really has much relevance to your somewhat simplistic views of thinkers and believers, much as you seem to be trying to bend the story to fit. All this proves is that these particular people are assholes, just as some of those who left nasty comments about Breitbart were.

Bob, you're missing the big picture here. The Young Turks had a whole segment of Wallace asking really tough questions of public figures.

No one in the media asks tough questions like that any more. Not a single one of those useless toads. They don't ask questions like that of Democrats, and they're even more ridiculously gentle with Republicans. This is not how a democracy is supposed to function.

Over the course of the Cold War, the media started thinking of itself as part of the establishment rather than a watchdog over the establishment, and this should not be allowed to stand. Nothing illustrates the way American journalists coddle American politicians like seeing an American politician get interviewed by a journalist from another western democracy. The series of "how dare you?" facial expressions the American politicians wear in such debates is proof of the sad state of modern American "journalism".

How exactly does Bob still have so many conservative readers of his politically oriented posts? He's kind of been opposed to a lot of their issues for at least a couple years now. Don't they know just not to click his obviously political posts by now? Or do they just enjoy being upset?

@Anonymous: How exactly does Bob still have so many conservative readers of his politically oriented posts? He's kind of been opposed to a lot of their issues for at least a couple years now. Don't they know just not to click his obviously political posts by now? Or do they just enjoy being upset?

Speaking for myself, it has much less to do with direct disagreement (don't have strong feelings one way or the other on either Breitbart or Wallace) and more to do with what a pompous ass he is on sociopolitical topics. When a man says, with all seriousness, things like "There are essentially two kinds of people: THINKERS and BELIEVERS" and posits that as a basic tenet of his worldview, I'm not inclined to take his pretentions of being one of the enlightened Thinkers with any seriousness whatsoever. That shit wouldn't pass muster in Intro to Philosophy at your local community college. When he goes on to act like resentment against the oh-so-genteel Thinkers is behind things that are obviously and simply explained by the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, a.k.a. the motivating force for the vast majority of similar behavior on any number of topics all over the Internet, that's beverage-spewing ludicrous, and should hardly go unremarked upon.

(As for the "well why are you reading" implication: because it's on this blog, which I follow for the writings on movies and '80s pop culture, two subjects on which Bob does - generally - less posturing and more knowledgeable discourse. If it's here, and if I have an opinion, I'm going to comment on it.)

I feel like some people aren't getting what Bob is saying when he's pointing out the Breitbart commenters reacting to someone else's death. What he was saying was that the media responded not calling Breitbart out on the scumbag he was in order to not offend his fans, IE these people commenting. He wasn't pointing out the differences between how liberal and conservative people act on messageboards, within the context of what he was saying he was illustrating that in spite of these people's lack of respect for the deaths of others when they disagree with their beliefs, why should they hold a media that disagrees with him to a standard they don't hold themselves to?And it's not deserving of a "congrats bob you've discovered people who comment on the internet are assholes",It's pointing out an inconsistency within these assholes commenting's beliefs, which is important in postulating his theory regarding the possibility of the media's handling of Breitbart's death being influenced by a possible backlash of his fans.Now, talking a debating on whether or not that is true could be a legitimate discussion that I might be on the dissenting side of. The media more often than not flips from hatred of someone to loving them after they've died, just because if they can have that both ways, than they'll be able to take the most story juice out of someone's life, which, in a media I think honors ratings, money and sensationalism over journalism and the truth, is what you get.

...you do realize most of these examples are comments about his career, right? No, they should probably not be there yet. After all, everyone deserves time to mourn and out of respect for the dead, but that is nothing compared to what I've seen for the very guy you are bitching about the followers of....

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About Me

Bob is a part-time independent filmmaker, part-time amateur film critic and full time Movie Geek. He is heterosexual, a pisces, and a severely lapsed Catholic. He is a tireless enemy of censorship, considers his personal politics "Libertine" and enjoys acting as a full time irritant to overly serious people of ALL political stripes.